A single blueberry season
I’ve started working on my créole lately. I wasn’t particularly intent on studying another language. We already speak three at the farm, Spanish being our lingua franca given the time spent with our Mexican crew. But necessity is the mother of invention, and a smattering of créole has been useful given the help we’ve been getting from workers hired on a daily basis through a season program run by the UPA (Union des producteurs agricoles). Every year we face the challenge of figuring out how to harvest our blueberries when we’re already going full tilt on the vegetable front and our regular team is spread too thin. And so this year we welcomed them, a small crew of grand-mothers – Viergela, Marie-Ange, Violette, Lumène: old-fashioned names from another time and country – who work only during the summer months. Hard workers who have had a hard life, soft-spoken and stoic, but who open up if you take the time to get to know them. They combed through our blueberry patch to provide some summer sweetness and have already moved on to another farm, another crop – weeding a carrot or a cabbage patch somewhere, perhaps. And so it is that we have begun to acquire an ear for créole, all it took was a single blueberry season.
Another summer basket awaits, the blueberries to be replaced by our first melon, a sweetly ripened cantaloupe. Mother Nature is still generous, so one has to get creative with eggplant and summer squash. In a not too distant future, there will come a time where neither will be found in our baskets…
August has begun as it is often wont to do, i.e. with hot days and cool nights, a clear reminder for us market farmers that we are already heading towards fall. I know, I know – we have to enjoy summer while it lasts, we who live in these northern climes where summers are so short and winters so long. In agricultural terms, though, the cooler nights also signal to the plants that they have to think of their progeny, and weeds heed that clarion call more than most, revving up for one last hurrah before they drop their seeds and are spent. Despite all this, your baskets will have corn and many other things to remind us that summer is still in full swing.
While our first zucchinis and cucumbers provided a foretaste of summer, this week’s offering of tomatoes and eggplant should convince you that summer has indeed arrived. Tomatoes and eggplant are my two favourite vegetables/fruits, the possibilities they open up are endless, and we will be serving them to you until the plants yield no more. Unlike the zukes and cukes, which we succession plant, our solanaceas offer a continuous harvest from the same plant which just keeps on giving, week after week, until the first frost.
A scant two or three days over 30◦C and already, you’d think we’re at the height of summer! All of a sudden we’re faced with full-on heat, humidity, scarce rains and trying to figure out how to deal with it all. Fortunately, over the years we’ve developed something of a Pavlovian reflex: as soon as we see hot weather settling in, we move to unwind our ‘layflat’ tubing, hook up the drip tapes and turn on the pumps in our irrigation ponds. A technical break from field work that is a life-saver for our plants, but that always begs the question : ‘what will we do if the well/pond runs dry?’ – a question which is sometimes not just a rhetorical question, as demonstrated by last year’s record-breaking July drought. To water or not to water, when to water, how much to water: it’s a calculated risk we take, we’ll deal with the fallout later if necessary.
The farm has abruptly tipped into summer, without warning or fanfare. Overnight, it seems, we’ve gone from rainy days and chilly nights to balmy weather with hints of the dog days of summer to come. Our solanaceae have suddenly regained vigor and strength, and our cool-weather-loving brassicas are even looking like they may bolt. For your market gardeners, all these signs are encouraging indicators of a morale-boosting return to normalcy in the fields. And yet we are ambivalent : these same signs herald the beginning of our annual, always epic, battle of the weeds – in which we will be engaged until Fall frosts bring the skirmishes to a definitive close. And so it is that last week ended in a flurry of hoe blades, as we took advantage of the warm sunny weather before rain scheduled to fall again later this week.
Just as we were beginning to despair, the sun finally appeared, and some heat, too. As we toured the fields today, Sunday, we felt Mother Nature bursting at the seams, impatient to make up for lost time. Like us, she is all too aware that summer is short in our northern climes and that a successful season means taking advantage of every minute of every hour of sunshine that the weather will allow. We’ve already had a few unwelcome visitors – potato beetles in our eggplants, cucumber beetles in our winter squash. Isn’t it early, you may ask – indeed it is, but climate change oblige, past is no longer prologue. They have arrived, and we’ll have to make do. Beetles notwithstanding, the season is finally launched, and we’re glad.